CONSTANTINE E. McGUIRE, PH.D.,
FOUNDER OF THE SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE,
AND MAN OF MYSTERY,
DIED IN NEW YORK ON 22 OCTOBER 1965,
AT THE AGE OF 75.

Constantine E. McGuire was a man of mystery.
Although he was member of the American Historical Association for
more than fifty years and was treasurer of that association for six
years, at his death the available records showed little beyond the
date he had joined the association, and did not indicate even where
he had been educated, nor in what university or field of study he had
worked. The situation was no different at the American Catholic
Historical Association, of which he had been president in 1933.
Although he resided in Washington for 38 years, his closest
associates did not know where he lived, but simply knew that he could
be reached by writing to him at Box 1, the Cosmos Club. This was his
address for 48 years and continued to be used until his death,
although he had moved from Washington to Geneva, New York, at the end
of 1952. In that town also he had no published address, but received
communications at Post Office Box 447.

In some ways, the Cosmos Club was the center about
which McGuire's public life revolved. For decades he could be found
there, almost every day, in its lounge rooms, library, or dining
room. Most of his acquaintances assumed that he lived at the club,
but an associate who saw him almost daily for years told me that
McGuire had a house at Chevy Chase, cared for by an ancient
housekeeper. This ministrator may have been a relative, for, when
McGuire was himself already in his sixties, he told various people
that he was the economic support of seven very old persons, of whom
three were in ill health.

I wrote above that McGuire could be found at the
Club "almost every day", but in fact he vanished from Washington for
weeks or even months, every year, on business trips abroad, chiefly
to Latin America. Many who knew him casually at the club were puzzled
as to what he did, and tended to assume, from his obvious great
learning, that he must be some kind of a professor. Indeed, as we
shall see, that is what he planned to be and probably should have
been, but, in fact, for more than forty-five years, his chief living
came from his work as a private and very confidential consulting
expert in international economic affairs, especially in matters of
international finance and foreign commercial law. When still in his
twenties, he drafted numerous treaties and other international
agreements in commercial affairs for our State Department and was,
for years, economic adviser and financial adviser to various foreign
governments. It was rumored among McGuire's friends that he was one
of the most influential Catholic laymen in the United States, had
been adviser to the papacy on American financial matters, and, in the
summer of 1929, just before the stock market crash, had advised the
Vatican to transfer its security holdings here into gold in
anticipation of a panic.

While we are concerned with rumors, it might be
mentioned that a character in Somerset Maugham's novel,
The Razor's Edge
(a part played by Clifton Webb in the film version) was reputed to
have been inspired by McGuire.

Whatever truth there may be in such rumors, it is
a fact that at the age of thirty-two (in February, 1923), McGuire was
made a Knight of St. Gregory the Great by Pope Pius XI, and included
among his associates and friends many influential scholars and
officials of the cosmopolitan world in which he lived. None of these,
however, was allowed to have any overall view of his activities, so
that it is no easy task today to give an adequate account of his
life.

Constantine McGuire was born in Boston on 4 April
1890 and, like many ambitious Boston-Irish, penetrated the precincts
of Yankeedom by attending the Boston Latin School and Harvard
University. At both places, he was a contemporary of Joseph P.
Kennedy. McGuire took three Harvard degrees: a bachelor's degree,
magna cum laude,
in political science in 1911. a master's degree in history the
following year, and a doctorate, also in history, in 1915. His chief
interest lay in the history of public law and institutions of the
Middle Ages, so that much of his study was with Charles Homer Haskins
and Roscoe Pound. With the latter he studied Roman law and
comparative law. In 1913-1914 he went to Europe on a Harvard
Travelling Fellowship, chiefly to Madrid and to Paris, where he
studied law. He also attended classes or courses at Leiden, Bonn, and
Salamanca. In Paris he attended the École des Langues Orientales
Vivantes, and began to dream of seeing a
similar institution in the United States.

On his return to Harvard in 1914, McGuire became
an instructor in history and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the
history of immunities from royal jurisdiction. He took his Ph.D. in
1915 and looked forward to becoming a Harvard professor, but, in the
course of that year, it was made clear to him that, as he expressed
it, "Harvard had an unwritten rule which barred any Roman Catholic
from teaching medieval history".

Bitterly disappointed at this blow, from which he
never really recovered, McGuire left Harvard and gave up all aim of a
teaching career. He took a position as research assistant in the
office of the Secretary-General of the Inter-American High Commission
in Washington, and within a few months, was made Assistant
Secretary-General. At that time, the High Commission had much
prestige, since its ten members consisted of John Bassett Moore,
Samuel Untermyer, Paul M. Warburg, John H. Fahey, Duncan U. Fletcher,
David F. Houston as chairman, Guillermo A. Sherwell, Leo S. Rowe, and
ex-Mayor Andrew J. Peters of Boston. The Commission had twenty-nine
national sections, made up of experts and civil servants of the
different countries, each presided over by each nation's Minister of
Finance. It was by these connections that McGuire established the
contacts through which he later exercised his influence and made his
living. Within a few years, in a manner which is unknown, he
established those contacts with the Vatican which he later
transferred, to some extent, to Father Walsh.

The High Commission worked to facilitate
international economic relations between states, seeking to stabilize
monetary exchanges, remove conflicts of laws, smooth all
international transactions, and, if possible, unify or coordinate
regulations on business organizations, including corporation laws and
bankruptcy. In these efforts, McGuire worked closely with the State
Department, drafting international agreements, and became the chief
figure in these activities when Leo Rowe, the Secretary-General of
the High Commission, became Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
1917. It might be pointed out that Rowe in 1919 became Chief of the
Latin American Division of the State Department for about a year and
then, for twenty-six years, until his tragic death in an automobile
mishap in 1946, was both Director-General of the Pan-American Union
and, at McGuire's behest, Lecturer in Latin American History at the
Foreign Service School.

McGuire left the High Commission in 1922 to join
the staff of the Brookings Institution as an economist. He stayed
there seven years during which he wrote numerous economic reports and
collaborated with Harold G. Moulton on a large volume,
Germany's Capacity to Pay; A Study of the
Reparations Problem (McGraw-Hill, 1923).
In 1923 McGuire edited a study of American Catholicism entitled
Catholic Builders of the
Nation (5 volumes, Continental Press,
Boston, 1923). He made numerous trips abroad and in 1928-29, lectured
in Berlin and Milan.

In 1929 McGuire resigned from Brookings and
devoted full time to his activities as a private economic consultant.
He served for many years as economic adviser to Venezuela and engaged
in a similar role with Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Nicaragua, and
other countries, as well as for private concerns and
individuals.

As we have mentioned, McGuire was treasurer of the
American Historical Association in 1930-36 and was president of the
American Catholic Historical Association in 1933. In World War II he
acted as civilian adviser to many high military and naval officers,
including Major-General George Strong, then head of U.S. Military
Intelligence;

From his arrival in Washington in 1915 to his
death, McGuire avoided all publicity and covered his activities with
a cloak of secrecy which is almost impenetrable. He refused to appear
in Who's Who in America, in the American Catholic Who's
Who, rejected offers of honorary degrees
and, it is believed, of foreign decorations. He did, however, accept,
in addition to his Papal title, the Venezuelan Order of the Liberator, and a
nomination as a trustee of Notre Dame University. In 1922, when
Father Walsh published a volume called The
History and Nature of International Relations, which consisted of public lectures by ten outstanding
authorities given in the auditorium of the Smithsonian Institution in
1922-1921 (a series instigated and arranged by McGuire), the book
appeared with a dedication to McGuire. The latter wrote at once to
the University, acknowledged the compliment, and expressed his regret
that his name had appeared in public. Two years before, he had
written to Father Walsh to insist that his name be removed from the
School catalogue. At that time the catalogue also listed the names of
an "Advisory Committee"; McGuire wrote to Father Walsh in the same
letter, "I also recommend that the phantom 'committee' be notified of
its existence and then discharged."

To the Georgetown community, McGuire's chief
interest must rest in the very great role which he played in the
founding of the School of Foreign Service in 1919, the founding of
the Institute of World Polity in 1944, in Father Walsh's whole
career, and, more remotely, in the establishment of the Institute of
Languages and Linguistics in 1949. Much of this should be expressed
in McGuire's own words.

In a letter dared 29 April 1953 to Father William
F. Maloney, S J., then Provincial of the Maryland Province, McGuire
wrote, "The plan for the school was drawn up by me in 1916-1917 and
discussed by me with Father Thomas I. Gasson, S.J., [then Dean of the
Georgetown University Graduate School] and Father John B. Creedon, SJ., [then President of
Georgetown University]. Father Creedon could not see his way clear to take
it on. I then tried to interest Bishop Thomas J. Shahan, of the
Catholic University, who likewise felt it beyond his resources. At
this stage, one day in the summer of 1918, I recounted the story to
Father Richard H. Tierney, S.J., on one of his visits to
Washington....He took the school plan with him that afternoon to
Georgetown. The next day he told me that Father Creedon would receive
me the following Sunday so as to discuss it once more. It was then
accepted in principle; and when the armistice came, the plan was
given effect. Father Walsh had reported back from the Student Army
Training Corps work and was assigned to take on this task....Very few
persons have any knowledge whatever that I had something to do with
the origin of the school; in fact, few persons, in or out of the
Society, are now living who know that I had. Probably Dr. J. de S.
Coutinho is the only man at Georgetown University other than Father
Walsh, who knows it...."

For about three years, 1919-1922, McGuire acted
unofficially as executive secretary of the school. He assumed the
task of finding and hiring the faculty, obtained the first
substantial financial contribution ($20,000 from James A. Farrell,
President of the U.S. Steel Corporation), and made constant
suggestions, often about very minor matters, regarding the operation
of the School. For example, he sent Father Walsh numerous "memoranda"
in which he suggested, among other things, that monitors be appointed
in each class to take attendance and exclude unauthorized persons,
that the language classes were getting too large and should be
divided into sections of no more than thirty students, that specific
numbers of text books be ordered and that a designated number of
these be placed on reserve in the library, that some courses were
larger than had been anticipated and that, accordingly, assistants
must be appointed to correct papers and that the salaries of the
teachers concerned should also be increased. In addition, McGuire
sent Father Walsh drafts of public speeches, including that given by
the Regent in the Smithsonian on 14 January as one of the first
series of public lectures mentioned above.

In finding a faculty, McGuire showed an unusual
talent for discovering men of ability and scholarship, who were then
almost unknown but subsequently became famous. At that time McGuire
was definitely "persona
grata" with the Russian Ambassador.
Through him in 1919, he discovered three recently arrived refugees:
Michael I. Rostovtseff, Michael Karpovich, and Baron Korff. All three
were unknown at the time in the United States, yet Rostovtseff, who
became a professor at Yale in 1925, was regarded as the greatest
scholar in ancient history working in the United States; Karpovich,
who taught Russian history at Harvard from 1927 to 1957 is still
remembered with affection and respect by all who knew him;
Baron Korff unlike the other two, accepted a teaching position at the
Foreign Service School and stayed there until his death. In a similar
way, in 1919, McGuire sent Sherwell from the High Commission to be
Professor of Spanish. At the same time, he hired a 26-year old State
Department official, Dana Gardner Monroe, to teach Latin American
history. Monroe was with the State Department until 1932, when he
went to Princeton as a professor of history and became Director of
Princeton's Wilson School of Public and International Affairs until
1958. When he was transferred to Chile in 1920, McGuire replaced him
with his own former boss, Leo S. Rowe, who taught at the School until
his death twenty-four years later. Others whom McGuire engaged in
those early years were Ernest L. Bogart, W. F Willoughby, James Brown
Scott, John L. Latané, and Stephen P. Duggan, all of whom were
outstanding authorities in their areas of competence.

Within two years (that is by 1921), McGuire was
becoming disillusioned with the School, partly because he hated all
pretense or any facade of publicity, but chiefly because he had,
despite his expertise, little grasp of the financial needs of such a
school. Basically, he did not want any undergraduate study or any
strictly vocational training, but wanted a high-level research
institute concerned with the broadest principles and the fundamental
realities of international affairs, to be used as a foundation for
policy decision-making. What he had in mind was much more like
Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), or All
Souls College at Oxford, or the American copy of All Souls, the
Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton. The separation of McGuire
from the School after 1923 rested on a difference with Father Walsh
on priorities: McGuire felt that expensive projects could well begin
before the necessary money was in hand (in the faith that God, or
perhaps McGuire himself, would provide); Father Walsh, on the other
hand, with a better grasp of household economia, if not of
international economics, could not commit the University to
expenditures before the money was available. Certainly he felt that
no grandiose projects could be undertaken without endowment, and that
until such funds were provided, the School had to have undergraduate
students to provide the tuition needed for survival. On this score
the Regent's position seems to have been more realistic.

That McGuire's dreams were grandiose is evident
from his letter of 1953, already quoted; he said there: "What I had
had in mind was the intensive study of those factors which determine
the course of foreign policy, combined with special auxiliary
training in languages. I had myself attended the great École
Des Langues Orientales Vivantes of the French Government in Paris
before the war of 1914 - 1918, and I knew that nowhere in the United
States better than in Washington could that admirable establishment
be used as a model.... The range of studies should be carefully
focused on the policy-making and long-ranged aspects of international
relations." Even in 1953 McGuire was still suggesting that the school
be turned in that direction. The elementary, undergraduate
instruction should be left to other institutions, especially to other
Jesuit colleges, under Georgetown's guidance, with the advanced work
provided at the School of Foreign Service. He wrote:"The coordination
of training in the elementary courses might well have local
variations to meet specific situations, but it would mean the
bringing into line all the work throughout the country under
authoritative and experienced guidance, and it would furnish a
substantial number of men suited for foreign trade and related
activities in their communities or elsewhere. The 'switch board' of
all this would be in Washington at Georgetown.... In the field of
research itself, at Washington, seminars with but limited numbers of
men could turn out, in the course of a few years, an impressive
volume of performance of high average quality; and in less than one
generation, the Western Hemisphere's most authoritative center of the
interpretation of the economico-social, psychological, and other
factors which affect the conduct of international policy would be
recognized as established at Georgetown."

As a result of McGuire's disillusionment with the
development of the School of Foreign Service as an undergraduate
institution, he became rather remote from it and from Father Walsh
for almost twenty years, 1923 - 1943. But the Second World War
re-affirmed his conviction of the need, in a Catholic context, of a
research institute concerned with policy making. Accordingly, he
persuaded Father Walsh, for whom he always had a deep personal
respect, to establish, as an appendage of the School, an Institute of
World Polity to consist of fifty highly qualified experts in various
aspects of international affairs, with a small paid staff of research
workers. The latter were to carry on research and prepare reports on
such research (reports pointing toward policy decisions) under the
guidance of the fifty experts. Such guidance as to be exercised by
individual suggestions, by critiques for revision of the preliminary
reports, and by joint dinner discussions of the problems involved.
This plan and technique was very similar to that practiced by the
English Round Table Group (which had been established by Lord Milner
in 1910, was financed by Rhodes Trust and other moneys, and had
founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919), which
played a very significant role in British foreign policy in
1910 - 1940.

The Institute of World Polity as planned by
McGuire was established in 1944, with a Research Director named by
him and a membership of fifty almost all chosen by him. The Director
was Dr. Ernst H. Feilchenfeld, a recognized expert in McGuire's own
area of international economic law and an extraordinary teacher. This
Institute still functions under the direction of Professor William V.
O'Brien. Typically, having set up the Institute, McGuire concerned
himself very little with its functioning and, in most cases. did not
even attend its plenary conferences. Equally typical was his remark
in 1953: "I thought its name gratuitously pretentious."

To some extent McGuire's neglect of the Institute
of World Polity, when he finally got it, resulted from his personal
unhappiness at the condition of the world; he looked with growing
horror at the rise of the authority of the state and the decline of
religion, a combination which, he felt, could lead to nothing but
disaster.

Despite his alienation from the Foreign Service
School after 1923, McGuire's influence still continued to be
exercised because of the extraordinary effect he had on Father
Walsh's outlook and associations. It seems likely that the links
between Father Walsh and the Vatican outside the regular channels
both of the Society of Jesus and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy
resulted from McGuire's influence. It probably was McGuire who
suggested that Father Walsh lead the Papal Relief Mission to Russia
in 1922, an event which opened the door to the Regent's subsequent
missions to Mexico, the Near East, Germany and Japan. It is not, for
example, generally known that Father Walsh, when occasion arose, had
direct access to the Pope, and, by his private nocturnal conferences
with Pius Xl, roused the ire of the then Papal Secretary of State.

Moreover, it is quite certain that it was McGuire
who first directed the Regent's attention to the importance of
Russia. In 1920, fifteen months before the surprising appointment of
Father Walsh to the Russian mission, McGuire was urging on him the
supreme importance of establishing an integrated Institute or
Department of Slavic studies at Georgetown. On 5 November 1920, he
wrote to Father Walsh about this: "Five or ten years from now the
demand for men who know Russian well will relatively far exceed the
demand for men who know other languages; and those who are acquainted
with Russian life and the conditions under which it is carried on,
with Russian literature and history, will find themselves in very
great demand. I think the time is ripe to organize a distinct Slavic
movement under the aegis of the Foreign Service School (incidentally
promoting the best foreign policy of this government, demonstrating
the foresight of the school authorities, and taking the wind out of
the sails of any mere Pan-American Institution), which would aim to
teach comprehensively the language, ethnography, economics, social
conditions, history, and international position of Slavic peoples."
He suggested that the program begin with a speech by the Russian
ambassador and consist at the beginning of a course on the history of
Russia given by Karpovich and a course on the economic conditions
given by Baron Korff. Once this is started it should be followed by a
course on Hungary and the Hungarian language given by Dr. McEachern
of the Catholic University. The passage ended with a rhetorical
questions as to where the money for such projects is to come from. To
this McGuire answered, "I will guarantee (as a sort of moral
obligation, in the words of President Wilson, rather than a legal
obligation), that the money will be found for this Slavic division
and for as many other 'ethnic' undertakings as you can set on foot."

It seems very likely that these urgings and the
call to Russia in 1922, had a good deal to do with the direction of
Father Walsh's interests for the next fifteen or more years, until he
became interested in geopolitics at the end of the 1930's. In this
way, and through his duties in managing the Foreign Service School,
the Regent found his life drastically modified by Constantine
McGuire, even in the lengthy period in which they met only
infrequently.

Note: From McGuire's secrecy the task
of compiling a biographical sketch such as this is very difficult and
could hardly be achieved without assistance from other persons. For
much of what appears above, I am indebted to the late Ernst
Feilchenfeld. Most of the documentary support for this came from the
Georgetown University archives, where I found Father Belwoar most
helpful. Other information was provided by the Papal Legation, by Dr.
Neusse of The Catholic Encyclopedia, by J. R. Trainor, former
secretary of the School, by Professor Sherbowitz-Wetzor, from the
Cosmos Club, and from others. I wish to thank all of these for their
assistance.